Thomas Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, son of a milkman and a Sears & Roebuck switchboard operator, neither of whom graduated from high school. Lux was raised in Massachusetts on a dairy farm. He was, according to those who knew him in high school, very good at baseball, basketball and golf. Classmates also recall that he had a " Terrific sense of humor. "

He graduated from Emerson College in Boston, where he was also poet in residence from 1972-1975. His first book ... Memory's Handgrenade ... was published shortly after. Since 1975, Lux has been a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. Lux is also a core faculty member of the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers. In 1996 he was a visiting professor at University of California, Irvine. A former Guggenheim Fellow and three times a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lux received, in 1995, the $50,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his sixth collection, Split Horizons. His poems are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and many other anthologies.

He currently holds the Bourne chair in poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology and runs their Poetry at Tech program.